Final App Ideas

When we return to school in the classroom, we must start working in earnest on the final apps for this class. Here are a few things you can expect.

• You will have only about four weeks to finish the final app.
• The app must be ready to submit to the Apple App Store.
• You must complete this project in order to get college credit for this course (it is part of your final exam).
• You will mostly be working in pairs.
• I will usually try to have a struggling student work with another student who is doing better.
• I will usually pair you with another student who is not sitting near you.
• I will usually try to pair students with complementary skills: for example, a good designer gets paired with a good coder. This is the way companies usually work.
• I will give you a grade on your final project based on the proportion of your contribution. For example, if one person does 2/3 of the work and the other person does only 1/3 of the work, the student who did more work will get an A, but the student who did less work will get only a C, which is not enough to get college credit for the course. So plan to put forth your best effort as part of a team. This is also the way real companies work.

The very first step toward your final app is to decide what the app will be. You will need to give me three app ideas: your first, second, and third choices. This will better allow me to pair you up with someone who has similar interests. Here are some guidelines:

• Your app should be something that makes the world a better place. (Albeit possibly in a small way.)
• I do not allow any games except educational games for children, which I encourage.
• The world does not need any more video or music players.
• We are not equipped to make collaborative apps that communicate between phones or between a phone and a server. This kind of programming is beyond what we learn in this class. (You can read about it in Unit 5.)
• The two biggest-selling app store categories are: 
• educational programs, and
• health and fitness.
• Think about the projects we did at the beginning of the school year. Could you write an app that tackles one of our pervasive problems such as:
• homelessness
• human trafficking
• bullying
• gun violence
• drug use
• Think about projects that might help students in another class here or at your home school. Examples of some projects that students have done in the past:
• Resistor Color Code (beefed up) with tutorial mode
• HVAC symbol dictionary with tutorial mode
• Welding symbol dictionary with tutorial mode
• Metric conversion for use in culinary and/or medical, with tutorial mode
• Anatomy app 
• Sign language app to help hearing students communicate with deaf friends
• Other examples:
• Are you a musician? Could you make a music dictionary? A music symbol dictionary? 
•  Chemistry app?
• Trigonometry app?
• Children's educational apps:
• Help children learn colors, numbers, shapes
• Translate the colors into different languages (e.g.Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Japanese)
• Add audio

Write up your app ideas in Google Docs. For each idea, I need to know the following information. You can use bullet points. I'm mostly interested in a summary, not a long discussion.

• What does your app do?
• How does your app make the world a better place?
• What is the target audience (briefly)
• How many screens do you think you'll need? 
• What kind of navigation might it use? (tab bars vs. navigation controller vs. other kind of navigation)
•  How many graphics might you need to make using Adobe Illustrator? (Example: welding dictionary has at least 50 different symbols. HVAC dictionary has about 50 symbols.)
• How many sound files might you need? (example: 10 colors x 5 languages = 50 audio files)
• What new thing might you need to learn in order to make this app possible? (This lets me know what I might teach next.)

Share your three app ideas with me at mbrautigam@metroed.net. If you prefer to do this using Microsoft Word, send me the file in email as an email attachment. This counts under the academic category of assignments, so it is worth a few % of your grade.

App Icon Sizes

Before you can publish your app in the app store, Apple requires that you make icons in many different sizes for different devices and purposes. You must include these icons in your app and with your app store submission. The sizes tend to change from year to year as new devices get released and old ones get retired.

Icons must come in different size factors.

• 1x icons are for the original non-retina phones and iPads. 
• 2x icons are for retina iPads and newer phones like 6*, 7*, and 8*. These icons have twice as many pixels in each direction (four times as many pixels overall).
• 3x icons are for the iPhone X, 10, 11, and 12. These icons have three times as many pixels in each direction (nine times as many overall).

Icons also have different purposes:

• Home screen
• Spotlight (search)
• Settings (smaller for a list)
• Notification (very small for a small popup window)
• App store (very large icons for your app store information page)

An example. If an icon must come in 40 px size in 1x, 2x, and 3x size factors, then you'll need a 40x40 icon, an 80x80 icon, and a 120x120 icon.

There are two places to get information about which icons are required. One is the Apple developer web site: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/icons-and-images/app-icon/. The other is within Xcode. Since most of you can't run Xcode from home (no Mac), I'm showing you the Appicon screen within Xcode here. (Click on the image to view it larger.)

Your assignment is to make a list of all the icons sizes you'll need to make in Adobe Illustrator as part of your app. List the sizes in increasing order from smallest to largest. Make a table in Google Docs. In one column, put the icon size. In another column, put the purpose or use of this icon size. There may be multiple uses for the same icon size. For example, note that a 40px icon at 3x will be 120px, and a 60px icon at 2x will also be 120px, so you'd only need to make one 120px icon in Adobe Illustrator, then you can use that icon for both of the other purposes.

Create this table in Google Docs and share it with me at mbrautigam@metroed.net. This is an academic assignment, so it has the potential to raise (or lower) your grade a lot.

After you have created the table in Google Docs, use the information to create an HTML page with an HTML table that has the same information. This is a technical assignment, in addition to the academic assignment. You can turn in the homework on the homework upload page http://mobileapps1920.svctestudents.org/submit/homework.php. 

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The Web for Women and Girls

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in March, 1989. For the web's 31st birthday, he wrote this open letter to the web community. As students of developing and design, you are a part of this community. You use the web every day.

https://webfoundation.org/2020/03/web-birthday-31/

Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee with young women in Nigeria

Read this article and write a report in Google Docs. Write this as a college essay, not a list of answers to questions. Write it as paragraphs, not bullet points. Share the essay with me at mbrautigam@metroed.net. I will grade your essay based on content, spelling, and grammar. This essay counts toward your academic grade.

In the essay, consider these questions:

• Why do we even care about gender equality? (Especially important for you to consider if you are not a woman or girl)
• What are the three areas that are particularly difficult for women and girls on the internet?
• How does Tim Berners-Lee propose we fix this problem?

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Free meals for those who need them

All the districts are supposed to be doing this. These are the fliers I could find. I could not find any flier for Los Gatos-Saratoga.

Three Weeks NOT a Break

We will not have regular attendance at SVCTE from Monday, March 16 until Friday, April 3. (Three weeks.) We are scheduled to return to campus on Monday, April 6. There will be no Spring Break because you'll already have had lots of time off. So we will on campus for classes April 13–17.

This schedule might change at any time as circumstances change.

Even though you will not be on campus, we will be assigning work for you to do. Here is how you can prepare.

• Send me an email at mbrautigam@metroed.net from your home email that you check daily (or constantly). That is the best way for us to stay in touch. This is your first assignment and it is mandatory.
• Make sure that you have unrestricted access to a computer where you can do a lot of work. It doesn't matter whether the computer is a Mac or a PC. But it should be a computer you can use a lot, at least 2–3 hours per day. It may not work if this is also your parent's work computer.
• Make sure you have access to your Google Docs account from home, because you'll be doing a lot of writing.
• Install Brackets on the computer so you can write web page code. You'll be making a web page out of your resume and adding it to your portfolio. Brackets runs on both Mac and PC. The web site is something like brackets.io.

Here are a few other things to think about:

• You can get a one-month free trial of Adobe Illustrator. Wait until I give you an Adobe Illustrator assignment; don't download it now. 
• If you have a Mac you can download Xcode to your computer and work on the Personality Quiz, then be ready to start selected lessons from Unit 4 (more information later). I can't give you mandatory assignments that require a Mac, because many students do not have one. But,  you'll be able to learn new things that will help you make a final app in this class.

Check back on Monday, March 16 for further instructions.

Coronavirus information

The video we watched in class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drMw2evwMFA

Some facts, from Santa Clara County Health Department:
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-coronavirus/Pages/ncov-faq.aspx

FAQs from Santa Clara County Health Department:
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-coronavirus/Pages/home.aspx

Survey

Please fill out this online survey. It will take less than five minutes. Answer to the best of your ability. Do not ask or answer any questions of me or your neighbors.

Our class is Mobile Apps.

https://forms.gle/WV4GpChVfUaJkHD39